Drought

2019 Indian Monsoon — Blessing or Curse?

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By Kip Hansen  – Re-Blogged From WUWT

In India, the monsoons that bring the rains are not just weather or climate phenomena — they are  mystical and mythical entities —  entwined into the national character and the annual cycle of life.

Now that the 2019 Southwest Monsoon is officially over, it is reported to have delivered 110% of the long-term average amount of rain to this mostly dry sub-continent.  It was just months ago that the international press was touting stories about water problems in Chennai.    You may be more familiar with the previous name of the city, Madras.  The NY Times covered the story and threw in a line: “And then there’s climate change. It doesn’t bear direct blame for Chennai’s water crisis, but it makes it worse“

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Bush Bull

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By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This will be a long posting, because it is necessary to nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia. The long, severe drought in Australia, culminating in the most extensive bushfires in recent history, ought to have aroused sympathy for the cattle-ranchers who have lost their livestock and the citizens who have lost their homes. But no. Instead, those who profiteer by asserting that global warming is the cause of every extreme-weather event have rushed to state – falsely – that an “overwhelming scientific consensus” (to cite the Greens’ website) blames the incidence, extent, duration and severity of the drought and bushfires on the somewhat warmer weather caused by our having increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 1 part in 10,000 from 0.03% to 0.04% by volume.

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Ten Climate Change Exaggerations

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Columbia University have released a statement on all the ways global warming will allegedly impact our lives. But like many such efforts the claimed impacts fail to consider simple adaptions already practiced by people who live in warm climates.

My comments in italics

10 Climate Change Impacts That Will Affect Us All

BY RENEE CHO |DECEMBER 27, 2019

1. Damage to your home

Floods, the most common and deadly natural disasters in the U.S., will likely be exacerbated and intensified by sea level rise and extreme weather.

Even if this is a problem, the solution is flood control, like our politicians should be doing anyway but all too frequently don’t – dredging rivers, building and maintaining dams, pumps and diversion channels. And decent drainage infrastructure, like municipal authorities build in the tropics, to rapidly remove large volumes of rainwater from tropical downpours, before they cause any harm.

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Wet Years, Dry Years

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

I keep reading all kinds of claims that the slight warming we’ve been experiencing over the last century has already led to an increase in droughts. A few years ago there were a couple of very dry years here in California, and the alarmists were claiming that “global warming” had put us into “permanent drought”.

Of course, the rains returned. This season we’re at about 120% of normal … it’s called “weather”.

In any case, I thought I’d take a look at the severity of droughts in the US over the last century. I always like to take a look at the longest dataset I can find. In this case, I got the data from NOAA’s CLIMDIV dataset. Figure 1 shows the monthly variations from 1895 to the present. Note that I’ve inverted the Y-axis on the graph, so higher on the graph is dryer, and down near the bottom is wetter.

Figure 1. Monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index for the continental US, 1895-2019. Above the dashed line is dryer, below the line is wetter.

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Water Scarcity in Cape Town

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By Michael Stahl – weather.com

In January 2018, officials in Cape Town — a port city on South Africa’s southwest coast that’s home to four million people — announced that the municipality was running out of water. By then, Cape Town had experienced three consecutive years of drought, culminating with its most arid year on record in 2017. Legislators believed that on April 12, 2018, they would be forced to shut down the entire water-supply system until local reservoirs somehow became reinvigorated.

Theewaterskloof Dam during Cape Town water crisis

(Getty Images/Evan Hallein)

Desperate Efforts to Drag the Climate Change Drought Narrative Back on Track

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT 

Aussie Climate Scientists are rushing to fill the breach caused by Professor Andy Pitman’s stunning admission there is no long term drying trend in drought prone Australia.

 

Link between climate change and drought
h/t JoNova – a slide from Professor Pitman’s presentation in June 2019

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Climate Change Could Revive Medieval Megadroughts in US Southwest

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By Earth Institute at Columbia U – Re-Blogged From EurekAlert

About a dozen megadroughts struck the American Southwest during the 9th through the 15th centuries, but then they mysteriously ceased around the year 1600. What caused this clustering of megadroughts — that is, severe droughts that last for decades — and why do they happen at all?

If scientists can understand why megadroughts happened in the past, it can help us better predict whether, how, and where they might happen in the future. A study published today in Science Advances provides the first comprehensive theory for why there were megadroughts in the American Southwest. The authors found that ocean temperature conditions plus high radiative forcing — when Earth absorbs more sunlight than it radiates back into space — play important roles in triggering megadroughts. The study suggests an increasing risk of future megadroughts in the American Southwest due to climate change.

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The Water Future of Earth’s ‘Third Pole’

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By: Carol Rasmussen – Re- Blogged From WUWT

Himalaya. Karakoram. Hindu Kush. The names of Asia’s high mountain ranges conjure up adventure to those living far away, but for more than a billion people, these are the names of their most reliable water source.

Snow and glaciers in these mountains contain the largest volume of freshwater outside of Earth’s polar ice sheets, leading hydrologists to nickname this region the Third Pole. One-seventh of the world’s population depends on rivers flowing from these mountains for water to drink and to irrigate crops.

Rapid changes in the region’s climate, however, are affecting glacier melt and snowmelt. People in the region are already modifying their land-use practices in response to the changing water supply, and the region’s ecology is transforming. Future changes are likely to influence food and water security in India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

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Sierra Nevada Snowpack at 162 Percent of Normal, California Water Supply Dream

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I notice they avoided calling it a *** dream

From The Watchers – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Posted by TW on April 3, 2019 at 19:46 UTC (1 day ago)
Categories: Featured articles, Ice & snow, Water crisis

Sierra Nevada snowpack at 162 percent of normal, California water supply dream

They note:

Snowpack at the station was at 200% of average while statewide snowpack is 162% of average.

“This is great news for this year’s water supply, but water conservation remains a way of life in California, rain or shine,” California Department of Water Resources said.

The state has experienced more than 30 atmospheric rivers since the start of the water year, six in February alone, and statewide snow water equivalent has nearly tripled since February 1, officials said.

Phillips Station now stands at 106.5 inches (270.5 cm) of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 51 inches (129.5 cm), which is 200% of average for the location. Statewide, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is 162% of average.

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California’s ‘Permanent Drought’

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Re-Blogged From WUWT

From the “children just won’t know what drought is” department.

A few years ago, some genius politicians, spurred on by some equally genius “climate scientists” told the citizens of California that we were now in a “permanent drought” situation. Of course, the NYT bought this drivel, and made it a headline.

We here at WUWT called bullshit on it, and now we can say “told you so” with impudence. A mere 1% of the entire state of California is now in a drought situation, according the the U.S. Drought Monitor website.

Just compare the previous first weeks of March:

California maps here: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA

Of course, we’ll still have shrill fools that will screech “climate change!” the next time the soil gets a bit dry, but for those people, there’s this lesson in California climate history:

From 2014, spot the portion caused by “man-made climate change”:

California_drought_timeline
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Disentangling California Drought

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By Jim Steele – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Here is Jim Steele’s newest column article for the Tribune and 5 other Marin papers,~ctm

Pacifica Tribune column, January 16, 2019

What’s Natural?

Disentangling California Drought

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Devastating droughts are a great concern. Droughts disrupt ecosystems, agriculture, and drinking water supplies. Contrary to headlines suggesting we have only 12 years before descending into climate hell with more severe droughts, historically, Californians are not experiencing more severe droughts. Despite low stream flows and withering plants, there’s no agreement on how to best define drought. Different methods suggest different severities for the same drought. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent assessment, downgraded their ability to detect the causes of drought to “low confidence”.

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Wildfires: Separating Demagoguery from the Science

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By Jim Steele  Re-Blogged From WUWT

I just received notice that my article, Wildfires: Separating Demagoguery from the Science

published in RANGE magazine received a joint 2nd place honor for Best Investigative or In Depth Story by the Nevada Press Association noting it was a “Good overview of fire ecology in the region.” I also cross published the article here on WUWT. I proudly cross publish all my article here on WUWT as it is the best place for independent thinkers to share with the public. I am very pleased that articles published on WUWT are also widely recognized elsewhere as important scientific journalism.

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Hunger Stones and Tree Ring Evidence Suggests Solar Cycle Influence on Climate

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By Francis Tucker Manns – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Abstract

Recent discovery of the relationship between the location of the North American Jet Stream and extreme weather is a breakthrough in the understanding of solar forced climate change.

Five episodes of extreme weather over a period of 282 years deduced from tree ring data show meandering of the North Atlantic Jet stream. It is fair to say that the summers of 2017 and 2018 qualify as a sixth event because of world-wide extreme weather in the northern hemisphere and also globally, resulting in flooding, wildfires and drought on every temperate continent. The monsoon has truly gone global.

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California Passes 100% Renewable Power By 2045 Bill

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

California may be done waiting for everyone else to get their act together on climate change.

Earlier this week, by a vote of 44 to 33, the state Assembly passed a bill that would require California to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2045. An equivalent measure already passed the state Senate. A whopping 72 percent of Californians support the measure. All that’s left is for Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to sign the bill. And he’s expected to do so.

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An Open Letter About Climate to U.S. Politicians Running for Office in 2018

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By Bob Tisdale – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen:

I suspect many of you have been and will be using global warming and climate change as issues during your campaigns this election year. Let me call attention to a quote from revered British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 2002 book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World.

It may be the first time you’ve read this quote, but I believe some of you may use it or hear it a good number of times between now and election day. From Statecraft, under the heading of HOT AIR AND GLOBAL WARMING, which is part of Chapter 11 Capitalism and its Critics, Margaret Thatcher wrote (my boldface and ellipses):

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California and the LA Times Latest Climate Alarmist Absurdities

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By Larry Hamlin – Re-Blogged From WUWT

An L. A. Times story addressed climate alarmist claims made in a report by the State’s Natural Resources Agency hyping its dire speculation and conjecture based on “climate models” whose “projections” we are supposed to believe represent real world outcomes.

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Four Ways We Know Pre-Columbian America Was Plagued By Megadroughts

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By Ashley Smart – Re-Blogged From Physics Today

In the August issue of Physics Today, climate scientists Toby Ault and Scott St. George share a pair of startling research findings. Between roughly 800 and 1500 CE, the American West suffered a succession of decades-long droughts, much longer than anything we’ve endured in modern history. And statistical models suggest that, as the climate warms, such megadroughts are increasingly likely to return.

Map of megadroughts
The western US was plagued by multiple decades-long droughts, data from tree rings reveal. Credit: Greg Stasiewicz. Data from the North American Drought Atlas.

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Carbon Fuels Conquered Famine – But Green Policies Are Inviting It Again

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by Viv Forbes – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

The Long War on Famine


Famine has haunted humans for most of their history.

In the days of the Pharaohs, whenever the Nile River failed to flood, Egypt starved. Joseph was called in and he organised stockpiling of grain for famine relief.

Even mighty Rome suffered famines – in 436 BC thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber.

The cold Middle Ages in Europe were haunted by famines. In the 11th and 12th century, famines averaged one in 14 years. Even in England there were 22 recorded famines in the 13th century. In 1235, 20,000 people died in London and people ate horse flesh, bark and grass. There were great famines in India, Bengal, France, China and Russia.

Victims of the Great Famine of 1876–78 in India (British Royal Photography Services)

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It’s Weather, Not Climate Change, Governor Brown

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By Robert W. Endlich – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Weather, not human-caused CO2-fueled global warming, is responsible for California wildfires

2017 featured incredibly intense, damaging wildfires in California: first the Wine Country fires of October, and later the massive Thomas Fire in December. Each destroyed hundreds of homes, the latter in many of the affluent suburbs and enclaves northwest of Los Angeles and Hollywood.

The Thomas Fire is the largest in modern California history, with over 1000 structures destroyed. The fires and subsequent mudslides killed over 60 people and left many others severely burned or injured.

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Global Warming and Extreme Weather

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By Andy May – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

This is #6 of 7 posts on the hazards of global warming.  If you can’t read the sign, it says “Global Warming, Absolute Truth that can not be questioned.”  The other two are discussing a global warming research vessel that was trapped in the ice. One wonders why the article doesn’t mention the ship was on a global warming mission. The other responds “For the same reason they didn’t publish those Muhammad cartoons.”

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Distorting of Climate Science

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By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website

Summary: Scientists and journalists play a vital role in the public policy debate about climate change, explaining the reports of the major climate agencies. Here Roger Pielke Jr. describes an example of how they too often misrepresent those findings, distorting the debate and feeding the public’s loss of confidence in science as an institution.

About those exaggerations in the media about climate.

“Pielke on Climate” – part 2 of 3.

About the misreporting of experts’ reports.

By Roger Pielke Jr. at The Climate Fix.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #260

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Global Climate Models: Judith Curry wrote a powerful critique of global climate models, “Climate Models for the Layman”, that was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. A few of the key points are discussed below. For those with a deeper interest in climate science or climate modeling, the entire paper is worthwhile.

In the executive summary, Curry presents several fundamental scientific points on Global Climate Models (GMCs) including:

“GCMs have not been subject to the rigorous verification and validation that is the norm for engineering and regulatory science.

There are valid concerns about a fundamental lack of predictability in the complex nonlinear climate system.”

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is well aware of the failure to produce valid models. Five-time Assessment Report (AR) commentator Vincent Gray of New Zealand has repeatedly stated this failure to the IPCC. The IPCC has responded by evasive tactics such as changing terms of predictions to projections and terming highly questionable, evasive procedures as evaluation. Government entities that depend on the IPCC findings follow suit. These include the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), including its highly dubious calculations of the “Social Cost of Carbon”, and the EPA in its ambiguous finding that greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, endanger public health and welfare.

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Hey California!!!, Wind and Solar Don’t Work in a Flood

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Re-Blogged From CO2 is Life

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I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Climate realists like myself have been trying to call attention to how dangerous the misallocation of resources caused by this war on climate change truly is. Now California is finding out…too late.

Live updates: Evacuations below Oroville Dam remain in effect as officials try to make repairs before new storms

Instead of building and repairing roads, bridges, and dams, Californians built wind and solar farms, and wasted fortunes on countless other “green initiatives.” Just today some California schools are banning meat and cheese from school lunches.

A BIG Green Budget

The focus during Brown’s 2017-18 Budget press conference was climate change policy and spending, increases in spending on childcare, High Speed Rail rather than road improvements, and another $2.2 Billion for the faltering green economy with cap and trade, which Brown promised to double down on.

California is now learning the hard way justs how costly and dangerous it is to worship at the altar of Climate Change. Nothing man or California will ever do will alter the trend in atmospheric CO2, but man can prepare for the impact of climate change, whether caused by man or natural forces. Reinforcing dams, building roads and bridges, managing forests and fire hazard brush, building endangered species breeding farms, buying up and protecting sensitive habitat are all legitimate issues that aren’t being funded because the money is being redirected towards wasteful and ineffective feel good do nothing projects.

To make matters worse, everyone saw it coming and did nothing to prepare.

Environmental groups predicted emergency spillway erosion in 2005 court document

An Oroville reservoir emergency spillway that rapidly eroded over the weekend was first predicted in court documents filed by environmentalists more than a decade ago.

American should use California as a case study in stupidity, and not repeat her mistakes.

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At least someone in California still has some common sense. “Make America Great Again” never looked so good.

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Be sure to read: How to argue the science of Global Warming with a Climate Alarmist and win.

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Lessons Learned From the End of California’s “Permanent Drought”

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By Larry Kummer – Posted at the Fabius Maximus Website.
Summary: The “permanent drought” in California, like the now ended “permanent drought” in Texas, is ending. But like the panic about Texas, it is rich in lessons about our difficulty clearly seeing the world — and the futility of activists exaggerating and lying about the science. Of course, they should have learned this after 29 years of trying (starting from James Hansen’s 1988 Senate testimony).

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Warnings of a permanent drought in California

Remember all those predictions of a “permanent drought” in California? Those were examples of why three decades of climate alarmism has not convinced the American people to take severe measures to fight anthropogenic climate change: alarmists exaggerate the science, and are proven wrong — repeatedly. When will the Left learn that doomster lies do not work?

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Fable of Stable Climate

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Ice_Age_Temperatures[1]

Translation from the Dutch book review “Het Sprookje van een stabiel klimaat” by Hans Labohm. Posted on the climategate.nl blog.

My loyal readers know him as co-author of my blog: the geologist, paleoclimatologist and climate sceptic Gerrit van der Lingen, an antipode of Dutch origin who has been living in New Zealand for many years.

Gerrit van der Lingen has recently published a fascinating book, “The Fable of a Stable Climate, the writings and debates of a climate realist”, which contains a collection of his essays, lectures, discussions and letters to the media about climate and associated subjects.

Most of the public information about the climate comes from scientists who studied the weather and weather processes and who consider temperature data of 150 years already a long period. For van der Lingen this is only one heartbeat in the geological history, which forms the only correct context for judging the present climate developments.

While studying climate change in the past he realised that the present belief in man-made catastrophic global warming (AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming), caused by CO2 emissions, is not supported by the science. He became involved in the climate debate, in which the protagonists of the AGW, who believe in the dominant role of mankind in the warming of the atmosphere, and the antagonists, who base their opinions on factual data and observations, are diametrically opposed to each other. It seems to be a debate between ideology and pure science.

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The End of Food

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

“So, you’re awake. But you’re still going to die”. The first words I heard spoken by my surgeon, waking from general anaesthetic, after a horrific operation to try to repair the mess created by my ruptured appendix.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful to the surgeon, whose extraordinary skill undoubtedly saved my life. But that day I believed his warning. I thought I was going to die. After all, he was a highly qualified surgeon, a credible source of information.

I learned something that week about credibility and evidence. People who follow WUWT might be aware of the flimsiness of the evidence behind sensationalist climate warnings. But most people don’t pay much attention to climate issues. Many of them remain susceptible to authoritative sounding scare stories.

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Climate and Human Civilization Over the Last 18,000 Years

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By Andy May – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

This is an updated timeline of climatic events and human history for the last 18,000 years. The original timeline was posted in 2013. The updated full size (Ansi E size or 34×44 inches) Adobe Reader version 8 PDF can be downloaded here or by clicking on Figure 1. It prints pretty well on 11×17 inch paper and very well on 17×22 inch paper or larger. To see the timeline in full resolution or to print it, you must download it. It is not copyrighted, but please acknowledge the author if you use it.

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Figure 1 -click for a much larger, printable poster (PDF)

References to the images and data are given in this essay as hyperlinks. I’ve done my best to verify the accuracy of the content by checking multiple sources. When references had different dates for the same event, I chose the most commonly cited date or the most prestigious source. All dates (except some in the modern era) are given as “BP” or before the year 2000 for simplicity, using 1950 (the radiocarbon zero) was too cumbersome.

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Science vs. Assumpsence: The Act of Knowing What You’re Quarreling About

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By Geir Hasnes – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Very often, and arguably most often, a disagreement is rooted in a lack of definition of what one agrees upon before starting the argument. Thus the argument soon develops into a quarrel, and while each side thinks he has won the argument in the end, he is also puzzled by why the other side doesn’t give in to the facts, of for instance, as in the case of the climate quarrel, the ‘Science’.

The statistician William M. Briggs, in his recent article Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized against Reality (link) asks: “This brings us to the crucial question: how do we reach educators like Johnson? We can’t do it with reality. Temperatures aren’t increasing, storms are down in number and strength, sea levels aren’t chasing folks from beaches, droughts are not increasing, parts of the world are growing greener.

“I don’t have the answer. Do you?”

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